I'm super stoked for Stockfighter to come out, but I'm confused about something...
If you intend for performance in Stockfighter to be used as a proxy for talent by recruiters, how do you intend to prevent cheating? Seems like it should be very easy for people to work in groups, or look up walkthroughs online.
Stockfighter generates signals about players. Those signals get fed to the Starfighter founders. We might choose to get in touch with particular players and, if they want to have a geek-to-geek chat, have a brief phone call with them. We then, if appropriate, introduce them to people who can hire them at our clients. We get paid if that introduction results in an accepted job offer.
People have asked us about a variety of ways to cheat on the games. Some of them don't strike us as even a little bit problematic, e.g. using an OSS library to access our API. (Some folks are already working on these and we're thrilled about that development.)
Some of the ways people could cheat on Stockfighter are, from the perspective of someone wanting to hire engineers, pretty awesome. If you get arbitrary code execution which busts out of an emulator written by the Ptaceks I urgently want to make your acquaintance.
Some of the other, more boring ways that one could cheat do not particularly strike me as bothersome to our business model. We're not selling certs; we're brokering introductions of candidates to businesses that want to hire them. Scamming a row out of our database doesn't meaningfully negatively affect the world, Starfighter, or our clients. I've got lots of rows.
Basically, IIRC, you're saying if someone does cheat (as in buys a good account or hires someone to kick ass for them), you human filter them anyways and it'll be pretty obvious they don't know what they're doing.
Though I was a bit confused by a statement you made. You said you'd need to beat the Turing test to automatically pass the last level of Stockfighter. But if that's true, how are you generating and validating the levels - that seems an equivalent challenge. (Unless you've made tons by hand.)
Something not previously mentioned as an answer, perhaps because its too obvious, is the existing standard hiring process is so badly broken that frankly "plays well with others" and "can successfully research obscure topics on the internet" and "knows whats important enough to cheat on" ALREADY produces an economically useful financially valuable product over the existing system. Anything better is pure gravy, and it probably won't be hard to produce something better than that lowest level.
Honestly its a big world and there are jobs for people merely smart enough to successfully reimplement based on an online guide with no supervision. Maybe 99.999% of humanity can't do that.
Or rephrased in an absolute theoretical sense its a problem, but in a relative competitive sense its not an issue.
If you intend for performance in Stockfighter to be used as a proxy for talent by recruiters, how do you intend to prevent cheating? Seems like it should be very easy for people to work in groups, or look up walkthroughs online.